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Tag Archives: conference report

At one point during this year's Clojure Exchange I was reflecting on the numerous problems and setbacks there had been in organising the 2016 exchange with Bruce Durling and he simply replied: "Yeah it was a 2016 type of conference". So that's all I really want to say about the behind the scenes difficulties, despite the struggles I think it was a decent conference.

Personal highlights

James Reeves's talk on asynchronous Ring was an excellent update on how Ring is being adapted to enable asynchronous handlers now and non-blocking handlers in the future. I didn't know that there isn't an equivalent of the Servlet spec for Java NIO-based web frameworks.

The Klipse talk is both short and hilarious with a nicely structured double-act to illustrate the value of being able to evaluate code dynamically on a static page.

Henry Garner's data science on Clojure talk was interesting again with some nice dynamic distributions and discussions of multi-arm bandit dynamic analysis. Sometimes I feel lots of the data science stuff is too esoteric with too little tangible output. This talk felt a little more relatable in terms of making dynamic variant testing less painful.

Disappointments

Not everything sings on the day. Daan van Berkel's talk on Rubik's Cubes suffered a technical failure that meant his presentation was not dynamically evaluating and therefore became very hard to follow. We should have tried to switch talks around or take a break and try and fix it.

The AV was a general rumbling problem with a few speakers having to have a mic switch in the middle of their talks.

We should have had the two Spec talks closer together and earlier in the day. The things that people are doing with it are non-trivial and it is still a relatively new thing.

clojure.spec

Spec is kind of interesting generally for the community. It has become very popular, very quickly and it is being used for all kinds of things.

One theme that came up in the conference was the idea that people wanted to share their spec definitions across the codebase. This seems a bad idea and a classic example of overreach, if someone said they defined all their domain classes in a single Java jar and shared it all across the company then you'd probably thing that is a bad idea. It's not better here because it is Clojure.

The use of Spec was also kind of interesting from a community point of view as the heaviest users of Clojure seemed to be doing the most with it. The bigger the team and the codebase the quicker people have been to adopt Spec and in some cases seem to switch from using Schema to Spec.

On the other hand the people using Clojure for data processing, web programming and things like Clojurescript have not really adopted Spec, probably because it simply doesn't add a lot of benefit for them.

So for the first time in a while we have something that requires some introduction for those new and unfamiliar with it but is being used in really esoteric ways by those making the most use of it. There is a quite a big gap between the two parts of the community.

The corridor track

Out of the UK conferences I went to Clojure Exchange felt like it had the best social pooling of knowledge outside of Scale Summit. Maybe it was because I knew more people here but the talks also had all kinds of interesting little tips. For example during Christian's talk he mentioned that S3 and Cloudfront make for one of the most reliable web API deployment platforms you can choose to use. I ended up making a huge list of links of reminders and things to follow up on. I've also included links to lots of the Github repos that were referenced during the talks.

Next year

And so with a certain inevitability we are looking to the next Clojure Exchange. We're going to have a slightly bigger program committee which should make things easier.

The other thing that we didn't really do that well this year was to try and have some talks transfer from the community talk tracks to the event. In 2017 we'll hopefully be more organised around the community and also have a series of talks that are tied in to the conference itself. If you're interested in being involved in either the organising or the talks you can get involved via London Clojurians.

I haven’t been to State of the Browser before. It is a very cheap one day conference during the weekend on the topic of web standards and the web in general.

Conway Hall, the venue is a beautiful place and very recommended. However the grand aura of humanist lectures did remind you how lame most slide-based presentations are. Shut out the light, we can’t see the cat gif!

The theme and topics of the conference are vague and therefore there was a lot of variety in the talks. More than half were coming from professional vendor advocates and while slick and enjoyable there was a palpable sense of yearly objectives being ticked off. Community communication, check; reminder of organisation mission, check. The rest of the talks were pretty crappy though so its not all roses in the community either.

Firstly the meaning of the web is very vague, there was an attempt to formulate the meaning of a “web platform” but it floundered a bit. The difficulty is not really what is the web, which is fundamentally unchanged since its inception, but rather what are all the companies doing when they try and build and expand on web?

Essentially what do browser vendors talk about when they talk about the web? To them the web is the input that the browser will accept. Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Google were all represented along with Telefonica who are making a big bet on Firefox OS.

One key theme was the belief that affordable smartphones (say below £50 to by and presumably close to £10 a month to run) are imminent and they will herald a new wave of traffic and content consumption. I feel that broadening on-demand access to the web is a good opportunity but the value of this audience, beyond hopefully buying data plans that are more expensive than talk minutes and text bundles, was utterly unproven and seemed an issue of no concern to the speakers.

One interesting thing about web development is that it is a place where visual design, technology and content creation collide into one huge grope box orgy where everything gets mixed up with everything else.

The visual design of the web was mentioned more than a few times and a lot of the standards work was essentially about delivering more fidelity to conceptual designs. It’s interesting that this is seen as fundamentally good thing rather than being interrogated. Perhaps it was discussed in earlier years.

There was also an interesting division in what people saw as their responsibilities. Javascript is now sufficiently complex that there is stratification and specialisation even with this niche. “Glass” people do UX, HTML and CSS, Javascript people do MVC “backend” work and performance and literally no-one is thinking about how the server could make any of this easier.

There was a dispiriting sense from a technology perspective of people hitting everything in sight with a golden hammer made of HTML/CSS/JS. About a fifth of the things discussed on stage boiled down to “a written standard for accessing OS capabilities based on an implementation of that standard”. It makes you appreciate things like Linux where there is pressure to actually tackle root problems and needs rather than layering hack on hack. The acceptance of the diabolic state of touch detection is an example, leading to the suggestion that you should progressive enhance on the detection of mouse events. I mean after all why use a filesystem abstraction when you could just iterate over /dev yourself?

The same paucity of leadership came up on the issue of HTTP 2 where it became clear that the vendors regard it as a way of dealing with the overhead of HTTP connections not really as a way to create the right kind of networking for the new activity we want to perform online.

It was also nice to see not one but two “standards” for defining viewport relative sizes: vw in the viewport spec (which seems very sensible and progressive by the way) and w in the picture/srcset responsive images standard.

There were a few moments when people seemed to touch on a better way of doing things, for example, declarative programmatic rules for layout; but these were rare. Maybe it’s just not that kind of conference.

In terms of talks the clear standout was Martin Beeby’s talk on what the Internet Explorer team have been doing to remove bottlenecks from their rendering. Most of the stuff was sensible and straight-forward but the detail on GPU interaction was fascinating, particularly on picture loading.

One massive problem with the conference was the weird idea that speakers weren’t going to take questions after their talks. Martin mentioned that buffers between the browser and the GPU were small and I would have loved to have know whether than was an intrinsic limitation or not. The lack of ability to follow up on issues diminished the utility of all the talks.

Other than that the walkthroughs of specifications of viewport, service workers (particularly the caching API) and the picture tag were all helpful. Andreas Bovens’s talk also had a helpful review of pixel density and its new related units.

The talks were filmed, I have no idea whether they will posted at some point but those are the ones I’d recommend.

The ticket was very cheap but the main issue of the conference was the time it takes. The programming is very baggy, I felt if all the talks had been halved in length and the panel discussion chopped to make room for post-talk questions there would have been a really good long afternoon of material.

I’ll probably give it another go next year but be a bit more ruthless about what talks to attend.

Okay so this post maybe happening a little later than Friday but in my defence there were some excellent conversations to go with the after-conference drinks.

Day 2 featured two talks by Rich Hickey, I had already seen some of the Datomic stuff from QCon and the web so I found the stuff on the new reducers library more engaging. I have never thought of map having an implicit ordering promise.

Meikel Brandmeyer gave a historical review of lazy seq which was really helpful for understanding laziness (something I have a bit of a problem with). One of the real highlights though was Chris Ford’s talk about canon music. It started with a good gag about sheet music being a DSL for using the finite state machine otherwise known as a musician. However the really amazing thing was Chris’s abstraction of the score and subsequent transformations of the abstract score to end up with variations on the base canon he had chosen. Really amazing. Chris’s talk really shouldn’t have been a lightning talk, it is about the only quibble I had with the programming.

Sam Newman also had an excellent closing line in his lightning talk on Riemann, which was if people want Clojure to be adopted widely then the secret is to create great things with Clojure.